calling functions over and over?! improvements needed

I was intrigued by your problem. And in an exercise of coding, I probably went a bit overboard. I am sorry if I've misstepped or if I'm not answering your question specific enough. But thank you none-the-less for the challenge.

In looking at your code, a few things stick out.

1. scope is being passed or set in many of the functions.
2. the comments objects structure seemed to make things more complex.
3. "load" having two meanings: get from server and build a DOM Element.
4. I didn't know why it was waiting for 300 milliseconds before processing the json.

Having scope throughout the code made me think that this should really be it's own object with a single 'id' passed in. Perhaps a jQuery plugin would be nice, but I went with a standard javascript function which I knew could easily morph to a plugin.

To further the single object idea, it seems that you are planning to do the same behavior again and again but with a different scope.

So with these thoughts in mind, I began to experiment a bit.

Some other more personal style differences:

• the use of setInterval eliminates any chance of pausing or restarting the updating.
• if using jQuery, why use getElementById?
• use jQuery functions to make DOM objects and not strings of HTML.
• use .html() instead of .empty() and .append().
• differences in naming.

At some point I realized I needed to expose some customization to the elements being used, so I extracted them into some defaults.

Here's what I came up with. Let me know if it helps or if you need me to explain what I was thinking. Also, it is completely untested. It is probably littered with syntax errors. There really is no good place for me to test without setting up a special environment.

(function($){
    $(function(){
        var comments = new PaginatedList("table#comments", {
                url: BASE_PATH + 'admin/comments/get'
            });

        comments.start();
    });

    var PaginatedList = function(element, options) {
        var settings = $.extend({}, defaults(), options);

        var instance = this,
            timeout = null,
            page = settings.startPage;

        var $scope = $(element),
            $listElement = $scope.find(settings.listElement),
            $pagination = $scope.find(settings.paginationElement);

        this.start = function() {
            getJSON();
        }

        this.pause = function() {
            stopTimer();
        }

        this.loadPage = function(number) {
            page = parseInt(number);
            getJSON();
        }

        var getJSON = function(){
            stopTimer();
                $.ajax({
                    url: settings.url,
                    type: settings.ajaxMethodType,
                    data: {'offset': page},
                    beforeSend: displayLoadingMessage,
                    success: processJSON,
            complete: waitBeforeLoadingAgain
                });
            }

            var stopTimer = function() {
                clearTimeout(timeout);
                timeout = null;
            }

        var displayLoadingMessage = function() {
            if (prependLoaderWhenReloading) {
                $listElement.prepend(settings.loaderElement);
            } else {
                $listElement.html(settings.loaderElement);
            }
            }

        var processJSON = function(json) {
            buildListItems(json);
                buildPagination(json);
        }

            var buildListItems = function(json) { 
                var $listItems = $(settings.templateElement),
                    data = json[settings.jsonItemKey];

                if (data && $listItems.tmpl) {  
                    $listElement.html($listItems.tmpl(data));
                    settings.setupListItemEvents.apply(instance);
                }
            }

            var buildPagination = function(json) {
                var data = json[settings.jsonPaginationKey];

                if (data) {
                    $pagination.html(data);
                    settings.setupPaginationEvents.apply(instance);
                }
            }

        var waitBeforeLoadingAgain = function() {
            timeout = setTimeout(getJSON, settings.timeBetween);
        }

        var defaults = function() {
            return {
                ajaxMethodType: 'POST',
                jsonItemKey: 'comments',
                jsonPaginationKey: 'pagination',
                listElement: "tbody",
                loaderElement: buildDefaultLoader(),
                paginationElement: "ul.pagination",
                prependLoaderWhenReloading: false,
                setupListItemEvents: function() {},
                setupPaginationEvents: function() {},
                startPage: 0,
                templateElement: "#comments-list",
                timeBetween: 60000,
                url: '/comments'
            }
        }

            var buildDefaultLoader = function() {
                var $loader = $('<span />').addClass('loader');

                return $("<td />")
                        .css(textAlign:'center')
                        .prop('colspan','8')
                        .html($loader);
            }
   }
})(jQuery);